The flogging of a 15-year-old rape victim: a legislative or institutional failure?
Maldives shocked the world in February this year when its Juvenile Court sentenced a 15-year-old girl, also a victim of rape, to flogging by a 100 lashes for the crime of fornication. This is an article contributed to Dhivehi Sitee by #OperationEndherima, a social media movement of Maldivians concerned by the sentence. It looks at existing legal mechanisms for protecting the rights of children and, in light of these, challenges the claim by the State that it is lack of law rather than institution failure that led to the flogging sentence.
The author wishes to remain anonymous, and wrote the original article in Dhivehi, a PDF version of which can be read here. I have translated it into English below for you.